Well, friends, we've reached the end of our playlist. The Stuff You Should Know Twelve Days of Christmas Toys. This one's one of my all time favorite episodes, not just toy episodes, but favorite episodes. The Easy Bake Oven which had this huge cultural impact. It still does today. If you want to make somebody nostalgic, just say easy Bake Oven and watch their eyes well up with tears. It's
really fun. At any rate, we want to thank you for joining us on this journey through our Christmas toy episodes, and we want to wish all of you happy holidays and Merry Christmas. From Stuff you Should Know.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Ramsey over there. The Huge which means it's I'm for Stuff you Should Know. Nostalgia Edition Colon ts Hodgman.
Yeah, we've done a few toys. Playto slinkies, right, what else?
What does a boomerang count as a toy? Uh?
That's away alive, mate.
We've done tons, we did silly putty, Silly putty.
Sure, we did.
You know a bunch that the balls, Yeah, the balls, the Ball's episode How balls work?
They round and they bounce.
We said balls like a million times in that episode.
Uh yeah, this one's kind of cool though. The easy bake oven, which I never had one. Did you ever have one in your home?
I don't think so. No.
I don't think my sister had one either.
I was a pretty tubby kid, So it's possible that my mom was like, make sure your brother doesn't know you have one of those, Do not feed your brother or anything from there.
But it's interesting that this is one where sort of a very simple idea and you never can tell what's gonna hit. Toy wise, nothing super complex about this other than you could literally bake food and sort of pretend to be an adult in the kitchen.
That was the basis of it. Being an adult. That was kind of Kenner's thing. And Kenner, the people who made Star Wars toys, were the ones behind this, and they were very much into toys that like let kids pretend they were grown ups.
Yeah, that was their bag. Yeah, I have a new neighbor. Actually shout out to Rick Kathy. Hey, guys, well.
They really got under your skin. Huh what. Rick and Kathy got a shout out on the podcast and their new neighbors geez.
Yeah, because he worked for I was talking to him and I was like, he seems like a good guy. And he's like, what you know, what do you do? Rick? He's retired, now what did you do? And he's like, I was away an action figure designer for Kenner And I.
Was like, wow, whoa what?
Years he came on after his first The first thing he worked on was the Tim Burton Batman movies. Nice and he stayed on for a long time, like his whole career, like after they were sold and everything. Wow, pretty neat.
That is very cool. Yeah, good for him.
Yeah, so he still does wonderful sculpture. So oh, I'll bet just go after Rick Watkins's art online and check it out.
I'm going to check it out.
But I mean Kenner, it is such a big deal to like to people our age and of many ages. But I didn't realize that they I didn't realize their origin as a company.
Remember in the We Talked, we did a whole action figures episode. Remember, oh yeah, and we talked a lot about Kenner. Was that a two part episode? Or was it just like an hour and a half long.
I feel like it was just long.
It was very long. But Kenner almost didn't do the Star Wars ones if I remember. But for us at least that Kenner on the map. What I didn't realize is that Kenner was already on the map as far as toys go. Yeah, And one of the ways that they got there was from the Easy Bake Oven, which debuted November of nineteen sixty three, right around the time that John Kennedy was shot.
Yeah, but Kenner had been around since the nineteen forties. Albert Philip and Joseph Steiner formed the company after, as legend goes, one of them saw a bubble you know, maker bubble wand or whatever you call them, yeah, and was like, hey, if I could do a gun that shoots bubbles, we might be onto something. And that was their very first product, is the bubble Matic gun. Yeah, and then whatever less than twenty years later, the Easy
Bake Oven. Even though as we learned today and yesterday, there had been toy ovens since like the Victorian days.
Yes, like really really dangerous I know, like real real little ovens, yeah, like wood burning, pellet solid fuel stoves made of cast iron that were sized down for little kids to use.
Yeah, basically like, here's the oven that can kill your parents, We'll just make a smaller one that can kill.
You, right yeah. Yeah, So the children's play oven functioning play oven history very kind of closely tracks the real oven history, right.
Yeah.
Like when there were cast iron wood burning ovens, there were kids versions of them. As they as real ovens moved into electric ovens, there were kids versions of them. Apparently Lionel the Train the model train makers, they made some in the thirties. Also, we want to give a shout out to Lisa Hicks and the people at Collectors Weekly for a great article we also used for this episode two. But in the thirties there were electric ovens. By the forties or fifties, I think there were fiberglass
insulated ovens, electric ovens. It was just like a small oven for kids, but they were ovens. They were extremely dangerous. And Kenner had this really great idea and the reason that this idea came about it Kenner to begin with. So apparently Kenner was really big on having like ideas could come from anywhere anybody in the company. Float An idea and people would listen and they had like regular meetings where you know, there were bull sessions. Maybe they
ordered some like Chowmaine or something like that. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and relaxed and spat out ideas. And one of the salesmen from Kenner came back in from the field and said, you know what, I saw something. I saw some pretzel vendors keeping their pretzels warm on the street using a light bulb. What if we used a light bulb to heat up an oven for the little kiddies? And somebody, I think Charles Howse, Ralph.
Howse Well Norman Shapiro was that gentleman ken Ronald Howse. Ronald House was the big time inventor for Kenner who had a couple of like really big products under his belt, and he was like that that's an ace's idea.
That's exactly how he talked.
Yeah.
Probably, so everyone hated him for it, but he was really good at inventing toys, so they had to put up with it.
Yeah. But Kenner's deal, like you were saying, was find things that mimic adult things. And that's like kinda I bet like kids are going to dig that stuff and they did from like, and kids still do little toy lawnmowers and toy bulldozers. And I mean Ruby's got a little cleaning set with like a duster and a dustpan and a mop.
And she is she OCD no.
But I mean all the time she will say, you know, come on, daddy, let's clean, and she'll hand me a mop.
That's a little OCD.
Well, no, that's good then. Yeah, I like where she said it.
Did you have one of those plastic safety razors so you could shave next to your dad? No?
I did, but I was I think a lot of boys are pretty obsessed with shaving before they have whiskers. Yeah, and I think I heard that they would actually stimulate hair growth on my face.
I was about to say, I remember being worried about that.
Yeah, because I didn't have I had a pretty I mean, looking at me now, you would never know, but I didn't have a lot of facial hair going on until well into college.
Was it like lacking or did it come in patchy.
Just a little bit, sort of like my brother is now he just stayed in that phase where.
Your brother's got a perfect chiseled face.
Well, I know that's because he doesn't have a beard. Oh okay, but Scott can grow a pretty decent goateea now, but I don't think he could grow the full beard. But his was. We were both spotty, like a little bit above the lip, a little bit on the chin.
One part, just kind of trace the line up to your eye from around from under your nose.
Yeah, but I mean it was sort of a family thing. We're not hairy dudes. We don't have very hairy legs or.
It is odd that you have such a full beard, Like.
I don't have hairy arms or anything like that.
Your beast, I don't know if beasts is the right word, but yes, I'm a little hairy.
You're a hairy guy.
My chest hair definitely plucks out from under my shirt.
Have you ever done any like laser or anything like that? No, No, good for you.
I'm just I'm Harry.
No, I mean you're normal. It's not like you're Robin Williams. No, he was hairy.
Yes he was, God rest his soul. Yes, indeed, So back to the Ovens. So the idea has been put out there now by Norman Shapiro. Yes, yeah, okay, So and it was taken up by Ronald House and this was this was huge and groundbreaking because again they were safe. There were unsafe ovens for kids that have been around since the nineteenth century. What these guys had just happened upon was the way to make another unsafe oven seem safe to parents.
Yeah.
That was that was it. That was the genius of this idea. That is what made easy bake ovens take off. What they'd figured out was that if they used a lot light bulb as the heating element, and believe me, a light bulb can can heat up an oven.
Sure three fifty Yeah, up to three fifty, which is a common baking stemp.
Yes from a light bulb. And actually, at first is we'll see a pair of light bulbs, but the fact is they're light bulbs and parents are familiar with light bulbs. They don't seem weird or scary.
Yeah, it's not a wood pellet.
And the fact that it's not like a heating element like in an actual oven, it's just a light bulb. That is what they used to convince parents that this was a safe product that they could buy for their kids. It was a genius idea.
It really was. And like you teased a second ago, the very first model in nineteen sixty three, and if you look at that very first one, it doesn't really even look like an oven.
Well certainly the new one doesn't either.
Now I did go online. I was like, maybe I should get one of those. But they're ugly now.
They I'm sorry to the person who designed them. Yes, I'm glad you said it. They are ugly little ovens.
Yeah, they should kind of go back to looking more classic. I think that'd be my advice. But they used two one hundred watt incandescent bulbs at first, one over the top and another under the bottom. Obviously they were trying to get an even heat because you're baking things, right.
And they very wisely designed this thing so that the actual oven part was basically inaccessible to the kit on either side. So just imagine a box. Okay. Oh man, here's the way.
Okay, it's my favorite thing when you try to describe something official.
Let me see if I if I close my eyes, it works. Imagine a box, okay, and then coming out from either side of the box or a couple of little little arms. But the arms are half arms, and they're rectangular and hollow, and they're actually openings. One opening, you slide in the uncooked thing that you want to bake into the heating area the oven, let it bake, and you push it through the other the other side, the cooling chamber, and then it comes out the other arm.
Everyone Josh has had his eyes closed that entire.
Time, and it worked. I really painted a great picture.
In your mind's eye. Yes, uh, yeah, so that's what's going on. You had the two bulbs and in fact, let's go ahead and take a break there. Oh oh, okay, a Nicett cliffhanger.
When we come back, I'll redescribe the easy bake oven again.
It sounds good, all right. We were at one bulb, right, yeah, I'm sorry, No, we were at two bulbs right so long ago I couldn't remember.
I know it was a full hour ago.
But then what they did was they figured if they just engineered this thing to distribute heat and hold heat a little better, almost like a convection oven. Yeah, exactly, like a convection of him, that they could go down to one bulb.
Yeah. There was a dude named Charles hold On I really wanted. Yeah, Charles Cummings, Charles one bulb Cummings. Yeah, that's what he was known as. Charles Cummings was a designer at Kenner, and I think in the late seventies he designed the interior of the oven so that the bulb one bulb created a convection current, so it cooked just as well as two bold but you just needed one. And he owns the patent to that. Oh really, which that's the way it should be. Yeah, he was the designer.
He came up with this.
It's pretty rare too.
I think Kenner, of course, I'm sure had an exclusive license to it, but I'm sure he got like a decent amount of money from that license agreement. That is the way it should be. He also created the patent, or he held the patent for the add on popcorn maker that you could put onto the easy bake oven. Too good for him, Good for you, Charles Cummings.
Charles one bulb Commings. He probably lives on top of the mountain somewhere. It's on a mountain of money. So all right, you're down to one bulb thanks to Charlie Cummings. They initially wanted to call this in nineteen sixty three.
When it was two bulbs, when it debuted.
Yeah, right out of the gate, they wanted to call it November of sixty three the Safety bake Oven, because they really wanted to drive this home was that it was super safe, right, and the regulatory bodies were like, you can't. You haven't even sold one yet, Like, we don't. We're not sure if this is going to kill kids.
It burned a dozen monkeys during the product testing tries.
Oh that's awful, but you can't call it that yet because we don't know yet whether it's truly safe. Go ahead and sell them, sure, but just don't still call it safe.
The Safety Bakeup. And so they're like, well, what about easy And they're like, are we still talking about this. We're done with you, go away, and they said they were like, okay, fine, we'll call it the Easy Bakeup. And then and they sold it as the Easy Makeoven and it sold out immediately. They sold it. So November nineteen sixty three is right before the Christmas season. Actually
it's in the Christmas season even back then. Yes, And they made a little more than half a million units and sold them all like before.
Christmas, Yeah, for fifteen ninety five, which is expensive. That would be about one hundred and thirty dollars today. No, yeah, that's an expensive toy.
Wow. And if you look at the thing. I saw a picture of one that's for sale on eBay for really cheap. I think it was like thirty bucks or something.
Really, it was.
Unused in the box, still needed to be assembled. But if you look at it, you're like, that thing looks like a death trap. Huh. It looks like the four pinto of children's toys from the sixties, you know, like the sharp metal edges. Yes, you're like, like, that's what it looks like, like like the baby strollers we were pushed around then.
Yeah. Remember that dan Aykroyd SNL skeet from years ago with the dangerous Christmas toys, And that was one called the Bag of Glass. That's so great, And that's all it was. It was just a bag of shards of glass. Yeah. So yeah, they sold a half a million and then they're like, we got to make a lot more of these for next year.
Yeah, because this is back at a time when toys didn't do that very often. You know, it seems like every Christmas now people are like, well, what's the toy we should go fight other parents for tell us.
Yeah, because I'm training in the ring.
This is when this is when it happened to organically. When you put out a toy and if it became like the fight worthy toy, that was a few and far between. Thinks the easy Bake oven was the fight worthy toy right out of the gate.
Yeah. So in year two, I think they they made about one point five million sold all those. And here was here's the little bit of genius from Kenner is anytime you can sell a supplementary product to the the big thing, then you're really cooking with gas.
That's like the ironically the Gellette razor model. I think it was King Gillette who came up with that.
Yeah. So what they did was they sold mixes, you know, these little instant mixes that you would pour and it would make a little credit cake. And they had twenty five of these at first. And we're selling those like crazy because if you're a kid, if you're a kid, you want all those. You're like, well, I haven't tried the strawberry cake yet.
Plus also, it's not like you're putting this in like a book like some baseball cards, and you're like, well, I've got this one. I don't need you eat that thing and you need another.
Thing and to replace it and you poop it out.
Yeah, and you're not gonna eat the poop again. No, you're going to go buy another one. And that was the genius of the other genius idea of this whole thing. There was a third genius idea to Kenner did this so right?
The license?
Awe? Not just no? The advertising?
Oh sure?
So remember this is kids emulating grown ups. That was their thing. It They advertised not just to kids through like Archie's comics, but they advertised directly to their parents too. Yeah, there were ads for the easy Bake Oven on I Love Lucy and on Hogan's Heroes. According to This Collector's Weekly article, and in these ads, if you look at a lot of old ads and even some of the newer ads too for easy Bake Oven, it's a mom and a daughter, right, and the parent is like, oh,
this is something we can do together. I love baking. It's basically my whole life. I live in nineteen sixty three and I'm a woman, so I would love to share that with my daughter. Maybe she's old enough to have an easy bake oven herself and that definitely helped propel sales for sure, because it's not just kids going on an easy bake oven, it's the parent's going that'd be a great thing to do with my kid.
Yeah. And of course, as people evolved and people became more woke over time, even though that word wasn't used enlightened, maybe it became a bit of a problem with gender roles and like this is for moms and daughters. They're pink, and that's what you're supposed to do is be in the kitchen baking for the men.
Yeah, I mean very famously, the easy bake ovens always ended with the disclaimer like this toy is not for boys.
Yeah, it didn't really, but essentially.
It was like that was this that was what was coming through. And the weird thing is as far as as like legendary and iconic a toy as the easy bake oven was, as gender roles. And yeah, as gender roles evolved, I mean this was we're talking like the early seventies when this really started to become like a thing. The easy bake oven did not evolve with it, as we will see. It wasn't until the early two thousands that they started to like respond to that kind of thing.
And I saw an ad for twenty fourteen, not a boy in sight, all girls and just dancing around like the girliest easy bake oven you could possibly imagine. It actually got more girly as time went on, girl focused, as gender roles went on, which is really weird to me to be that is not just non responsive, but almost like, no, we're going the opposite way.
Yeah. And in early two thousands, Hasbro who you know, they bought out Kenner.
Eventually makers are the classic snoopy snowcombe machine.
I never had one of those. Did you have one of those?
No? Neighbor did, okay, But.
You got to eat some of that sweet sweat sugar ice.
There was nothing like the taste of I think the cherry one, I can't remember, but it was just the greatest snow cone you could possibly have.
And that's until you had a shaved ice later and you're like, oh no, this is a lot better still.
Number one raining champ really Number two is blue raspberry slush Puppy.
Yeah. See, what I would always do was slurp that sweet liquid and that'd be left with just some faintly colored kind of just ice.
Oh yeah, no, I know it was the problem with it for sure. Yeah, but if you did it right and you just kind of let it settle, uh, you got you know, through the nasty stuff first, when you got to the bottom, then you got to the true, like hYP hyper dense snow cone experience.
Yeah. I could never do that. I'd still have problems regulating my like hot fudge to ice cream ratio when eating a Sunday. Oh yeah, I just won't even do it anymore.
So you do all the hot fudge first, and then you're left to some cruddy ice cream. Yep, that's pretty I.
Mean that's standard cretdy delicious ice cream.
Right This ice cream that some people around the world would kill for is cruddy. It doesn't have any more fudge. Dude.
I've been on a fifteen year campaign to convince Emily that vanilla ice cream is like a legit flavor. Sure, I think she's she still thinks that vanilla ice cream.
Is just like unflavored ice milk.
Yes, like it's the one without the flavor added, right, like no vanilla. Yeah, this is really delicious, it is.
It is. It's subtle vanilla bean ice cream like the true the flex so good with you.
So in early two thousand, they finally, like you said, tried in a very ham fisted way to get boys involved with the the qu easy.
Bake queasy bake is that what it is? Took me a second two because Q use a separate word.
So okay, now even hyphenated. So the queasy bake oven and the mixer rader for you boys, you can make mud and crud cakes and the larvalicious cocoon cookies and you know, not like, hey, just bake something good because anyone can bake.
Yeah, anyone can bake.
And they didn't like the girls don't don't use that one.
Yeah, it was it was only boys that showed up in these ads. They're like, we really need to get boys involved. How can we do that. Oh, we'll make one specifically for boys. That's like they're making cruddy cakes.
I mean, I know they're just trying to sell stuff, but when in these meetings, in these marketing meetings that you just can't help but think there it's like a bunch of like eighty five year old men. Our it's our senate. Yeah that's in there, right.
They're like screaming and pounding and yelling at each other about the idea of like selling this to boys. Oh man, well, after that, I feel like we take break.
Yeah, we'll go to our Senate chambers and regroup right after this. All right, So in nineteen sixty seven, the easy Bake oven is selling like hotcakes. Literally, General Mills buys Kenner and they did a couple of genius things. They partnered because they were General Mills. They had no problem because they owned Betty Crocker as well, I assume launching Betty Crocker branded mixes. And then later on they got into licensing deals with McDonald's and Pizza Hut Because
here's the thing. You can bake anything in an easy bak oven because it's just a little oven. Yeah, you can make pizza, and you can make you don't have to buy these mixes. You can just bake cook that you made from scratch.
Yeah, and there's like a lot of recipes online easy bakeoven recipes.
Yeah. They actually don't taste like garbage, right.
So yeah, they did have a huge line of mixes though, and they sold more than one hundred million of them over the over the years.
That's how they get you.
But I mean they there. There were recipes for mixes for candy bars, pecan brittle, popcorn, bubble gum. You could bake your own bubble gum. Interesting, it is interesting. I would have tried that for sure. I want to see bubblegum come out in like a brownie pan. Yeah, I'd be like, I want some of that bubble gum. That looks amazing.
We had a cotton candy machine, now that I remember what. It would just spin sugar and you would.
Oh, I know what they do. Yeah, I wanted one.
Yep. That thing was probably dangerous. It was probably like a nuclear centerfuge.
What was interesting about those are fascinating to me was like the cotton candy. Oh, it's not called it's like a not the web sugar or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I want to say web, but that's not it either. It's not really visible in the machine. Yeah, but when you stick in the little cone, it just builds up on it like it like it's just coming out of another dimension into this.
One, like coming out of a spider's butt.
It's awesome to see. Yeah, a pink and pink and blue spider's butt.
Man. I had to go out yesterday to uh, I still have my pickup truck then, because I just kept it because it was paid for and I still moved and haul stuff occasionally. Yeah, I had to move something.
Justify it to me.
I had to move something yesterday and I went out and there was the most beautiful, huge spider web from a tree down attached to the rear tailgate of my truck.
Me like chuck smash with this big.
Spider right in the middle, and I was like, oh man, I just felt so bad. I didn't know what to do.
So you just put in reverse and pretended nothing, you didn't see anything. No.
I actually plucked it off little by little because I wanted to ensure his safety. And the web just goes crumbling down into a long, you know, skinny string, and he climbs right up to the tree and I was just like, I'm really sorry.
He's like, oh, I'm sure you are.
Let's see you. He tried to sorry spit venom into my eyeball.
He's like, what do you need your truck for? And You're like, I gotta go get peanut butter. He's like, oh, good, thank you for ruining thirty hours of my work.
A giant vat of peanut butter that would only fit in my truck. All right, So let's let's fash forward here to the modern times. In two thousand and seven, okay, the Energy Independence and Security Act, when the government said by twenty twelve light bulbs have to increase their efficiency by twenty five percent. So bye bye one hundred watt incandescent bulb.
Yeah, so let me just say something. Let me set that up to Over the years, the easy Bake oven had just remained a steady cellar for Kenner and then has Bro, and the design had been basically the same and went from two bulbs to one bulb. But it was this closed box where the heating element was, where there was a slot on the side. Remember I went through the whole thing, pushed it in, and it came out the cooling chamber on the other side. But really
the design was the same. The outward look changed like it went from the weird its own thing to the late seventies and early eighties it started to resemble a microwave. And then in response to this change in light bulb requirements, Easy Bake did a redesign in two thousand and six, and for the first time ever, the easy bake oven actually looked like an oven, like a stove. It had little like fake burners on the top. It looked like
a stove. And it was actually a front loader to where there was like a slot in the front of the easy bake oven and that's where you put the thing in, and that's what you actually pulled it out from, too, and it went right into the heating element. And they replaced the light bulb because again so long hundred light bulb because of the energy act with an action heating element, a ceramic heating element like an oven. Yeah, it was
an oven, so they made an oven. But then when they made the oven, they redesigned this thing so that you could put your fingers right into the oven while it was baking at its hottest temperature. And of course kids immediately started doing that.
How did that one slip past?
No idea?
I mean, that just doesn't make any sense at all. So in the end, I think what close to two hundred and fifty kids ended up with like second third degree burns. Yeah, one partial amputation of a finger.
Yeah, because kids would get their finger stuck in it, right, and it's just set and then some kids got their finger stuck in it while it was heated hot. Yeah, and yes, they were getting huge burns. So Hasbro was like, well, we'll do a recall, and they recalled like nine hundred and eighty five thousand, I think ultimately a million of these things. They recalled. First, they tried to say, here's a little fix.
Yeah, here's a retrofitted piece.
It's really easy to snap it on and it'll solve everything. And apparently it did solve everything.
They're like, why didn't you make it that way to begin with?
Right, But most parents were not, like they didn't have their ears out that there was a recall of their easy bake oven and so the the kids kept getting burned, and finally Hasbro was like, just bring them back. So there's a recall of a million Easy Bake ovens from that two thousand and six redesign.
That's a toy for them, like to if that would have ruined the easy bake oven, that would have been a big big deal.
So what they did was they temporarily went back to an old design featuring a light bulb too, while they redesigned it to the new version. So then they came out in twenty eleven with that that really ugly designed what's called the Easy Bake Ultimate Oven.
Oh I'm looking at it now. That things. Yeah, it does. It looks terrible.
It's horrible. It's super It looks like it's on the go or something like that. I don't like it. It looks like a weird toaster oven.
Yeah, but it's sort of. It looks like it's trying to look futuristic and modern, which never ends up looking like that.
No it doesn't. But they also made it pink and purple. Yep, super girly. That ads were flowers girl targeted. Yet there's flowers on it, and again they were like, nope, this is for girls. Boys don't play with us. So in two thousand, I think twenty thirteen, there was a girl named McKenna Pope, Yes, who is just a hero of heroes. She's amazing. I saw an interview with her on CNN.
Pretty great.
She's just so like self possessed and intelligent and like well spoken but also like a kid and know where she's a kid. She's just amazing. One of those clearly reincarnated. And she went on she started a petition to get Hasbro to make a gender neutral version of its Easy Bake Oven because her little brother liked to bake but
realized that the Easy Bake Oven was for girls. She wanted him to be able to bake, so she said, Hasbro, why don't you make one that's gender neutral, and got something like fifty thousand signatures for her petition, and Hasbro came out with a new version of the Easy Bake Ultimate Oven, which was just a black version of it, black and a big silver.
I'm surprised it wasn't like our brush stainless model. Sure like to emulate, you know, Kitchens, right, Yeah, she's gee, she's probably almost twenty years old. Now, Yeah, when what she's doing mckennapope, are you out there?
She's some sort of like consumer protection lawyer. I'll bet probably so. I hope so, me too.
Two thousand and six, they go into the National Toy Hall of Fame.
The same year that disastrous redesign.
Yeah, they got in just under the wire.
Yeah, can't take it back.
I'm trying to look here, and they're from their very own website, some of the landmark years, and it is kind of funny that emulated the styles at the time, unless they were just doing pink. Like in sixty nine they premiered the avocado Green. Yeah, the very next year was of his gold.
Yeah, it's very good metallic p You say that.
A lot in our house. Oh, they had a potato chip maker, do we mention that? No, nineteen seventy three, the easy baked potato chip maker.
That's awesome.
And then in seventy eight they finally started putting a fake digital clock on it that always read twelve thirty. Okay, not for twenty. You see that a lot as a joke.
Sure, and like the pothead joke.
Yeah, but like you'll see an alarm clock ad in like a skymall or something, and I'll say four twenty.
Right, because the publishers are paying attention, they get it, doesn't know.
Or they don't care.
Sure.
I remember years ago when we used to have a lot of illustrations on how stuffworks and had two in the house illustrators that I won't name, and remember one of them drew a like a park scene for me and the tree clearly had a marijuana leaf like embedded in it. And I was like, hey man, you can't do that, and he was like, oh, that was completely an accident, right. I was like, man, I wasn't born yesterday.
Yeah, I've seen a pot leaf before.
I mean I thought it was funny, but like, you.
Know, yeah, I couldn't do that. You got anything else, I don't think so. Easy bake oven.
Mac and cheese you can bake. Oh. In two thousand and three they they introduced the real meal oven, and you could That's when you could do like French fries and pizza and mac and cheese and stuff.
I think that was the predecessor to the ceramic heating element that they eventually read the easy Bacon in two thousand and six.
Good stuff, good stuff.
If you want a nice blast in the past, just type in like easy bake oven commercials. There's one from nineteen eighty that was just perfect.
Yeah. Was it rad?
No? It was pre rad. Okay, it was like Carpenter's era, Gotcha, which was not rad but still lovely. Yes. I love the Carpenters me too. Well, if you want to know more about easy bake ovens or the Carpenters or the Snoopy snowcom machine, just go onto the internet. It's a vast repository of stuff like that. And since I said that it's time for listener mail.
Hey guys, I'm a freelance writer who works remotely, so I've been writing and traveling the world for the past year and a half. It's been wild. Since I've been traveling alone, it can get lonely, but from Mexico City to Bali to Tokyo, you guys have been with me, keeping me company, making me laugh, teach me all kinds of cool facts. As a content writer, I also feel
a connection to y'all. We both have to research seemingly mundane topics sometimes and discover the cool interesting things about them, present them in a palatable way. People sometimes laugh when I'm telling them I'm writing something like the history of the eg McMuffin or the best month to buy a mattress. But I just point to your podcast as a sterling example of how gems and surprises lie within even the most unassuming topics.
Thank you, Yeah, I agree.
Have you guys ever considered doing a show on digital nomadding never? I know it's becoming increasingly popular. Is more companies race remote working. I'm in a cafe and Madeline, Madaine, Columbia right now, and there are five digital nomads tapping away in their laptops as we speak.
They would beat me up if they knew I'd just referred to them as digital nomads.
The future is location independent. I say, thanks again for being so awesome. It's a short term dream of mine to digital nomad over to a country where you're doing a live show by you guys, a drink awesome. If you do read this on the air, please give a shout out to Mark Alexander, who insisted that I keep listening to you guys, even after I was initially slightly turned off by all of your sides and.
Off tracking happens to a lot of people.
And that's funny because we had a lot of those today.
You know. That reminds me of a totally unrelated story.
She says, Now I very much learned to appreciate those. He would burst into tears and I would too, So thank you, Mark Alexander for turning on your friend. Maria Christina Laedonde.
Thanks a lot, beautiful name.
Yeah, I'm sorry, Lalonde Leonde, Maria Christina Lalonde.
And I hope that your buddy did just burst out into tears. That'd be amazing, pretty neat. Thanks for that. Email. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find us on the web. But stuff Youshould Know dot com check out our social links there, and if you like, send an email to stuff Podcasts at houstuffworks dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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